'The Apartment' slowly raises its curtains

Updated 5:09 pm, Friday, December 13, 2013

SAN ANTONIO — A nameless first-person narrator from an unnamed U.S. “desert” city spends a day looking for an apartment in an unnamed European city.

The vagueness of character and place is offset, however, in Greg Baxter's novel “The Apartment” by rich, in-the-moment details.

The lack of a name for the I-narrator is purposeful. The character wants to become anonymous. “You can never escape who you are, never truly anonymize yourself,” the narrator declares. “Even if you never speak to anyone, people see you, and they get to know you for themselves.”

The narrator remembers his past during his apartment-hunting day story, and the person readers gradually “see and know for themselves” was once in the U.S. Navy. He went to Iraq twice, the second time as a one-person contractor who distilled intelligence and communications patterns to help the U.S. military and Iraqi police target attacks on the insurgency.

The narrator, age 41, is not suffering any post-war trauma syndrome. Instead, having garnered an insanely high amount of pay as a contractor, he just wants to disappear in a northern European metropolis that has long winters.

Saskia, a young, low-level bureaucratic economist, is helping the narrator find a central-city apartment during a snowy, icy winter day. She had first encountered the narrator in a museum while the narrator still lived in a hotel in the city. Saskia likes the narrator's company, but the direction of their relationship remains vague.

Much of novel seems absurdist, both the narrator's past recollections and his current situation, but the narrator is not disturbed by the absurd at all. He's very accepting of it and participates in it in his quest for invisibility.

Although the narrator describes places in the European city with visual details, readers will be defeated in trying to guess the city. Baxter said in an interview that the city is a conglomeration of various European cities with many sites just made up.

Baxter was born in Texas — the city is not revealed in his biography, of course — in 1974, but has lived the last two decades in Europe, presently residing in Berlin.

More Information

The Apartment

By Greg Baxter

Twelve, $24

The book's smart narrative is driven by the use of the present tense to describe the apartment-hunting day, but the narrator switches to the past tense to represent his memories that arise during the day.

The story is full of sad, depressing truths about modern life, but it also presents hints of hope, usually in moments when the past is temporarily forgotten. Readers can decide for themselves whether depression or hope prevails.